The Official Star Wars Blog is celebrating the release of The Clone Wars Season 5 on Blu-ray and DVD by publishing an interview with Dave Filoni, the series' supervising director. In part two of their conversation, Filoni discusses "what has to happen when Darth Sidious drops in for a visit, why Darth Maul may not be as bad a guy as we think he is, and how Ahsoka’s story ties into the themes of the Star Wars films."

Here's an excerpt from the interview where Filoni discusses Maul:

[A]nother thing that we elected to do when we were doing this whole Maul/Savage thing was, we elected to [have Maul] call him “apprentice” and abandon “brother” at the beginning of this four-part season arc. And then at the end he calls him “brother” again. There is a tragic thing to me about Maul, about Savage, because they’re apprentices. When you look into those evil characters, you find that, not to say that they’re not evil, but how evil are they compared to Sidious? If you listen to Ian McDiarmid [who played Darth Sidious in the films], he’ll say that he never had a redeeming quality about him. A lot of other characters, Darth Vader, for example, have redeeming qualities about them, but not Sidious. There’s always that separation. And I think, without giving anything away, there’s really something to that with Maul. There’s an internal struggle that you see with Maul that is trying to tell you there’s a lot more to his story than you know, and he’s not just an evil force for his whole life, mostly. In the first episode with Savage, I would argue that, well, he doesn’t really seem like that bad of a guy. And I think that there’s really something to that.